by Gerald Green
Later generations may not have the strength or will to finish the task. Or the opportunity. I think of my home, my family, and I know we are doing the right thing.
In the office, we drank, silently, and Heydrich slept, weary from his long, tiring day.
Rudi Weiss’ Story
More wandering. We had been told, after our escape from Babi Yar, that there were bands of partisans wandering in the forests of the Ukraine. We wanted to join one.
Of Babi Yar, we heard little. The Ukrainian farmers—not all of them as brutal and cowardly as their compatriots who joined in the massacre in the ravine—shrugged their shoulders when we asked about it.
But it was no secret. One old farm woman, her toothless gums working away, informed Helena that 140 carloads of clothing had been distributed to the poor Christians of Kiev and the countryside around it. “From the Jews,” she kept saying, “from the Jews.”
One cold morning, Helena began to shiver. She was sleeping in my arms in a ruined peasant hut, abandoned by a farmer gone to God knew where, perhaps drafted into the Red Army, perhaps a prisoner. It was cold and damp. I had stolen some blankets and we slept together, trying to absorb warmth from each other’s bodies.
“I’m cold,” she said. Her poor teeth chattered.
“Come closer.”
“It won’t help, Rudi. I’ll never be warm again.”
I rubbed her hands and wrists, but she would not be cheered, or warmed. “I can’t run any more,” she wept. “I’m cold. I’m hungry.”
“You think we should have stayed in Prague.”
“I don’t know … I don’t know. At least we could get food there. I had my apartment, friends …”
“Your friends are all in concentration camps.”
“I am a burden to you,” she said. “I cry too much.”
I looked at our few crude utensils on the table—metal cup, metal plate, spoons. Then I picked up the cup and hurled it against the fireplace. “Dammit. Dammit.”
She sat up in bed, weeping loudly now. “Rudi, it is hopeless.”
I grabbed her, lifted her from the straw mattress. “No. No. You gave me those lectures about that Zionist homeland you and your parents want to build in Palestine, out in some desert surrounded by Arabs. You think you’ll get that by sitting back and crying? By giving in to anyone who threatens you? That guy with the whiskers who talked about it—what’s his name—”
My ignorance made her laugh. “Oh, Rudi, you are crazy. His name was Herzl.”
“Well, that dream of his won’t mean anything unless Jews learn to fight. You think you’ll get that land without killing people? Or a lot of Jews getting killed?”
She shivered. “I’m sorry. I can’t think when I’m cold. I can’t be worried about Herzl when I’m freezing.”
Outside the hut I dug in the frozen earth and found some turnips that had not been harvested the previous fall. They were frozen, half rotten, but perhaps I could cut out some edible parts. A small orange cat followed me back into the house.
“Close your eyes,” I said to Helena. “I have a present.”
She did. I put the kitten in her lap.
“Pure-bred Ukrainian Siamese Persian. All for you.”
“Oh, Rudi … it’s as weak and hungry as we are.”
“Learn something from him. He’s a cat. He gets by.” I gave her a slice of turnip. “Try some. Full of vitamins.”
She gagged on it, began to retch.
“Make believe its a fresh breakfast roll. Hot strudel. Stollen. Mmmm. And the fresh coffee. Cream and sugar?”
I made her laugh. In feigned anger she threw the turnip at me.
Chewing on mine, I began to reflect. “Here we are, a proper Berlin family. Mama, Papa, and Cat. But we’ll never live in Berlin, Helena.”
“Nor Prague. We’ll go to Eretz Israel.”
She walked in back of me, put her arms around my neck. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Wherever you are, I’ll be happy.”
“And I will, too.”
“And our children.”
I petted the starved cat. “They’ll never believe the stories we’ll tell them. Running away from Prague, into Hungary, Russia.”
Helena laughed. “They’d better! They’d better believe every word.”
I took her in my arms. “I can see my son, Helena. Some little squirt with your Czech eyes and your terrible Czech accent, making fun of me. ‘Papa, you’re full of knockwurst!’”
She laughed again, but it was only to hide her misery. Poor, frail girl. We’d run off at my urging. Often she had misgivings. Her life in Prague had been pleasant enough until the Germans came. It was hard for her to break away. I felt guilty at what I’d talked her into. But I was convinced it was the only way.
I stared at her now, stroking the cat. A small, vulnerable girl, with a heart-shaped face, intense eyes, dark-brown hair. And I raged within to think of the way the Nazis murdered people like Helena—without hesitation, restraint, second thoughts. What in God’s name had created such monsters?
It seemed to me at that moment that the peril hanging over us, the horrors we had seen at Babi Yar and elsewhere, made it all the more vital that we love each other, never hurt each other, always be truthful and gentle with each other. Helena understood that also. I could see it in her eyes, sense it in her sighs, and small cries, and reluctance to let go of me, when we made love in barns, deserted homes, fields.
The cat jumped from the table, meowed, stretched and walked to the open door of the hut, as if attracted by something.
I heard noises outside. Soft footsteps, a sound of bodies brushing against foliage. A life in the wild had tuned my ears for these noises. Partisans? But which kind? We had been turmed away by one band of Ukrainian guerrillas. No Jews, they had told us. And added we were lucky they didn’t shoot us on the spot.
Someone kicked the door open, waited.
I took the knife from my belt and backed against the wall of the hut, motioning Helena to get behind me.
“Who is in there?” a man’s voice asked.
But he waited. He did not enter. I whispered to Helena, “Get under the bed.”
“It’s no use, Rudi … let’s give up.”
The man’s voice came again: “Come out. Hands over your heads. There are fifty of us here, all armed.”
The man who had spoken entered the doorway. He had on rough wintry clothing, odds and ends, not quite a military uniform, but suggesting one. He had a fur hat, an old Red Army coat, felt boots. Around his shoulders were two bandoliers. He pointed a Red Army rifle at me.
“Rudi, it’s no use,” Helena whimpered. “Put down the knife.”
“She’s right. Drop it. Out, both of you. Clasp your hands on your heads.”
We did so. He stood aside to let us pass. I thought of jumping for him, but there were others outside, at least two whom I could see, a man and a woman in the same quasi-military collection of rags, old clothing, felt boots. But oddly, they were unarmed.
The man with the rifle spoke in Russian to Helena. He seemed to be in his early fifties, grizzled, with a lined face.
The three stood facing us in the dead garden of the vanished farmer.
“One lousy gun,” I said to Helena. “I should have jumped him and taken it from him.”
“Will you try it now?” he asked.
“No, but I may later. Where are your fifty armed partisans?”
“They’ll be here when I need them.”
There was a moment of quiet, as we studied each other, and then the realization dawned that all five of us were Jews!
“Who are you?” the older man asked. “Don’t lie.” He stared at Helena. “Would you prefer that I speak Yiddish?”
“We are Jews,” she said. “Running away. He’s a German Jew and I am from Prague.”
The young woman opened the collar of her tunic and revealed a Star of David on her neck. “Shalom,” she said quietly.
“Shalom,” said Helena.
/> I still hesitated to move toward them, so suspicious had I become. But Helena did not hesitate. She fell into the girl’s arms, weeping for joy. The older man lowered his rifle and extended his hand. I shook it, and then we too embraced, and the younger man hugged me, and unashamedly kissed me.
“I can’t believe it,” I said. “Jews with guns.”
“Very few guns,” the young woman laughed. Her name was Nadya. She was very dark, with strong, intelligent eyes. “Those fifty armed partisans are part of Uncle Sasha’s imagination.”
The older man was Uncle Sasha. He told us, as we began to walk through the woods, that he was the commander of the partisan brigade in the Zhitomir area. All the people in the brigade were Jews. The Ukrainian partisans had their own units, and would permit no Jews to join them.
I told him how Helena and I had been turned away by just such a band.
The young man—he was called Yuri—nodded. “You are lucky you were not killed by them. It is inconceivable to us. The Germans are enslaving them, killing their young men, burning their homes, stealing their crops, and you would think they would make common cause with the Jews of the Ukraine. But no. They still find time to hate us, to reject us. It fills a man with despair.”
“To hell with them,” Uncle Sasha said. He paused before we entered a thickly wooded area of tall trees, a kind of semi-cultivated forest, perhaps an abandoned tree nursery. “Careful, now. Single file. You, the German, follow me. You look as though you won’t mind getting into a fight.”
“I’d be happier with a gun.”
“We plan to get some very soon. Come along.”
We walked through the damp, cold forest. Once I looked over my shoulder at Helena. She was smiling. At long last, a glimmer of hope.
Sometime in March 1942, my brother Karl and his fellow artist, Otto Felsher, were sent with a shipment of Buchenwald Jews to the new camp at Theresienstadt.
The camp was thirty miles or so from Prague, and had once been a garrison town in the time of the Empress Maria Theresa, later an ordinary Czech village. But the Czechs had been moved out, the buildings enclosed and isolated, and it was now a prison, but a very special kind.
It was, in effect, a “showcase” camp—a false front to deceive the outside world. While Jews starved and died there, and later were merely kept for a brief time before transport to their doom, the Germans spread the word that it was a “Paradise Ghetto,” an “old folks’ home,” a “special camp” for VIPs, Jewish heroes of the First World War, educated and refined Jews from Germany and Czechoslovakia.
Doing research for this story, I learned that Rabbi Leo Baeck of Berlin, the leading Jewish clergyman in Germany, was a prisoner there. So were several Jewish generals. And a Jew who had been on the board of I. G. Farben.
Several hundred people from Buchenwald were herded off the trains and marched into the main square of the camp. (I visited it after the war, and I could not help but be impressed—from the outside at least—with how attractive it was. Baroque buildings, heavy doors, clean streets. But it was all a fraud.)
The commandant welcomed the new visitors. He was an SS colonel, an Austrian, and he stressed, over and over, that this was a city given to them by the Führer, a city for the Jews, and it was up to them to keep it clean and neat, to obey the laws, to cooperate with the authorities. Theresienstadt would disprove all those lies people were spreading about the terrible things Germany was doing to Jews.
If they disobeyed his orders, he added, if they told lies, smuggled, stole, made the city filthy as was the habit of Jews, then they would suffer the fate of common criminals. And he directed their attention to a gallows just beyond a side gate, near a small inner fortress, from which were hanging the bodies of three young men.
The group was then disbanded, and told that their own community leaders would supply them with quarters and job assignments.
An attractive middle-aged woman named Maria Kalova, who survived the holocaust and from whom I received much of the information concerning Karl’s years in Theresienstadt, then approached my brother and Felsher.
“Weiss? Karl Weiss?” she asked.
“Yes.” He laughed, turning to Felsher. “I can’t believe it. A committee of welcome for a prisoner. Did you expect my friend Felsher also?”
“Indeed we did. Word gets around. I’m Maria Kalova. I work in the art studio. You two are assigned there. In fact, one of the SS officers heard about your work and requested you.”
Felsher made a sour face. “More bloody genealogical tables. Proving these thieves and liars are all descendants of Frederick Barbarossa.”
“Be grateful,” she said. “It is no hotel here, but one manages to get by.”
She walked them through the camp. To Karl’s astonishment, there was a neatly kept main square, and a series of stores. Stores in a concentration camp! And a bank, a theater, a cafe.
He asked the woman Maria Kalova about them.
“They are all fakes, false fronts. Truly, this is the Potemkin Village of all time. The bank circulates useless currency. The bakery never has bread. In the luggage store you can buy back your own valise. Perhaps a cup of warm ersatz coffee once a week in the cafe.”
“What is it?” asked Karl. “A game?”
“No, it is much more than a game to the Nazis,” Maria said. “When you go to the barracks you will find them filled with old, dying people. We are barely sustained with the food they give us. Punishments are severe for the slightest infraction. You see that small fort there? That’s the Kleine Festung. The SS torturers do their work there. This is really not much different from Buchenwald except in its external appearance.”
“I don’t get it,” Felsher said.
“Theresienstadt is their passport to respectability,” Maria said. “Periodically the International Red Cross, or some neutral—the Swedes, for example—will demand an inspection of a concentration camp. They are brought here. And so they are shown the bank, the cinema, the bakery, the shops—and they are asked for their approval. What are those Jews complaining about? The Führer has given them this beautiful city.”
“And they get away with it? The inspectors believe them?” Karl felt he was losing his mind.
“Maybe they want to believe,” Felsher said.
The artists’ studio at Theresienstadt was large, airy and light. Karl understood at once that the people employed there were an elite, looked upon with favor by their SS masters.
He soon learned why. They were all part of the Nazi scheme to present the camp to the world as a model city, to distract the world from the true facts of life in the camps—the Auschwitzes and Treblinkas that were soon to go into business as the great factories of death.
On the wall were colorful posters with legends like SAVE FOOD! CLEANLINESS ABOVE ALL! and the eternal WORK WILL MAKE YOU FREE! The art work was superb. It should have been. Some of the very best Czech and German artists were imprisoned in Theresienstadt, as well as many musicians, including several orchestra conductors, composers and performers.
Several men were at work at easels, painting scenes of what can only be called “happy ghetto life in Theresienstadt.” Karl, who had seen children in the streets of Buchenwald, and even Theresienstadt, fighting over crusts of bread, winced.
A husky man came forward from his drawing board and introduced himself to Karl and Felsher. His name was Emil Frey, and he was the director of the studio. He had been a rather well-known artist and teacher of art in Prague.
“You’re pleased to be finished with Buchenwald, I gather,” he said.
“This looks like an improvement,” Karl said.
Frey said, “We’re the lucky ones. You, Weiss, and you, Felsher, keep your noses clean, and you might survive also.”
“Does anyone ever escape?” Karl asked.
“This is no ordinary prison,” Frey said. “It’s guarded and guarded again—walls, barbed wire, dogs, SS, Czech police. The last thing the Nazis want is for the world to know they are lying abou
t Theresienstadt—and all the camps.”
As Emil Frey spoke, Karl began to stroll around the various easels and drawing boards, studying the works in progress and the finished, idealized paintings. There were tributes to German womanhood, the Führer in knightly armor, charming drawings of “camp life”—musicales, theater performances, playgrounds.
Maria and Frey fell silent as Karl made his tour of the studio. Felsher trailed Karl, shaking his head.
He stopped at the edge of Frey’s drafting table and looked at him intensely. “These paintings are a collection of lies.”
Frey again was silent. Then he said to Maria, “Stand watch at the windows. We must begin the education of our two apprentices.”
As soon as Maria was at the large window, Frey removed a board from his table and extracted a roll of drawings. He unfolded them and held the corners down. “We are a rather eclectic group here,” he said to Karl and Felsher. “What you see displayed is one style, perhaps romantic, but we also deal in realism, social commentary it you will.”
The first picture was a pen-and-ink drawing—bleak, terrifying, entitled “Condemned.” Three bodies dangled from a gallows. SS men stood about leering. The second was called “Last Voyage”—a pencil drawing of a wagonload of coffins, each marked with a Star of David.
“Yours?” Karl asked.
“All of us.”
Maria called from the window. “Commandant,” she said. “And an inspecting party.”
Frey rolled up the drawings and returned them to the space beneath the loose board in his table.
Seconds later the SS commandant, an Austrian named Rahm, and two civilians entered. The civilians, as nearly as Maria remembers, were from the International Red Cross—Swiss, perhaps.
Rahm, the SS chief, asked cheerfully, “And how are my artists today?”
Everyone came to attention. Frey answered for all. “Quite well, Herr Commandant. All of us busy.”
Rahm beamed at his guests. “These gentlemen are from the Red Cross. They have heard about our extensive art program, our creative painters, and wanted to visit the studio. Quite an atelier, eh, gentlemen? Hardly a torture chamber, as the Jewish press keeps insisting in America. Frey, show our visitors those portraits of children.”